Search didn't stop at Google. A meaningful share of the questions that used to trigger a search-and-click now get answered directly inside ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity — no visit to your site required, sometimes no visit possible even if the user wanted one, because the answer engine has already summarized it for them. Whether that summary is accurate, and whether it credits you at all, depends on whether your site is structured for a generative engine to read it correctly. That's GEO.
What GEO actually adds on top of SEO
GEO isn't a replacement for SEO — it's mostly the same technical foundation (clean metadata, structured data, a crawlable site) plus a small set of things classic SEO never needed to care about:
llms.txt: a plain-text summary of what your site/product is, aimed at AI agents rather than search-ranking algorithms.- AI-crawler-aware
robots.txt: explicit rules for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and similar — not just the classic Googlebot/Bingbot pair most robots.txt files were written for. - FAQPage schema written for direct-answer extraction: content phrased as a clear question and a self-contained answer, because that's the exact shape a generative engine pulls from to quote you rather than paraphrase you incorrectly.
Why this matters even if you don't think about "AI search"
You don't have to believe generative answer engines will fully replace traditional search to have a reason to care about this. Right now, today, a meaningful number of AI crawlers are already visiting sites to build their answers — the only question is whether your site currently lets them in, and whether what they find is accurate. Both of those are usually one afternoon of work to check and fix, not a strategic bet on where search is heading.
The disambiguation problem
One thing GEO catches that pure SEO often misses: if your business name or product overlaps with something else on the internet — a similarly-named company, an unrelated older product — an AI answer engine has no reliable way to tell the two apart unless your site says so explicitly. A clear, direct statement of who you are and who you're not, phrased for extraction, does more to prevent a wrong answer than any amount of traditional keyword optimization.
If you want an honest read on where your own site stands on this — not a guess, an actual audit — see how the SEO/GEO engagement works, or send us the URL.